gt0

I do too, but I think we're too deep into the duopoly of Android and iPhone now for anything else to succeed. I need 2FA apps, I need my banking app so that I can 2FA the desktop browser banking. I want Audible or some other audiobook option.

I'd love to go back and get a Blackberry, the pre-QNX one, but I think Android is the least-bad option here. We need certain apps, and Android is the only way we'll get them.

Tcl/Tk was the first "grown up" language I used after using variants of BASIC up until the mid to late nineties. I bought a used Sun Ultra 1 and Tcl/Tk was like a vision of the future compared to BASIC.

I still sort of want to use it again, but can't quite find a reason to do so.

Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.

An amazing thing I was reminded of just yesterday is that COD4:Modern Warfare ran on the PS3, with 256MB RAM.

I think "Code was never the hardest part" is more fair.

Code itself can absolutely be difficult, but it's seldom the most difficult part of a project. Generally the hard part is actually figuring out what you want, and how to achieve what you want, then the actual code is pretty straightforward in most cases.

I've been programming since the the 1980s and I'm not insulted by the idea that code isn't the hard part.

It seems to me that some companies are looking to move off COBOL and mainframes to say Linux and Java, because that is what someone was employed to do, not because it's necessarily a good idea.

I think COBOL systems would be plenty maintainable if the owners of the systems invested in maintaining them. If companies just let people retire, attempt to hire replacements with unremarkable salaries, then maintenance is a problem.

If they paid salaries that reflected how critical this work is, I don't think it would be that big a problem to find and keep good developers.

We have critical economic infrastructure being treated as annoyance and a cost centre.

I think there has probably always been gaps between what marketing wants to sell, what management wants to prioritise, what programmers want to make, what customers say they want, and what customers actually want.

Those gaps are getting bigger all over the place, technical users generally just want all the bullshit to go away and just have a reliable and simple system, but no mainstream software companies want to sell it.

Realistically only macOS runs on Macs, Linux worked on the early M series but not later models, as far as I know.

In Australia, it wouldn't even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.

Made me think of Breadbox Ensemble, which is GEOS, and was really lovely.

Free OS updates is the norm now though. If you'd bought a Windows PC 7 years ago, or used Linux, or just about any other desktop OS, you'd have had free updates.

The Framework 12 look lovely, I like the design a lot, but like other Framework computers, it's just far too expensive for what it is.

The processor inside it is approaching 4 years old and wasn't a good processor at launch.

I like how it looks, but I won't spend that much money on so little computer.

This seems as much like "sleep" as when a laptop "sleeps".